Something about a man who was trying to board a plane last week in Lima, Peru, caused customs officers at the international airport outside the capital to do a double take: He had an extraordinarily swollen belly.
They asked him to lift his shirt.
When he did, they found he was carrying 320 tarantulas, 110 centipedes and nine bullet ants. Each of the bugs was crawling around inside its own small plastic bag, where they were obscured by filter paper, according to the National Forest and Wildlife Service of Peru. The bags were reinforced with strong adhesive tape and attached to two girdles that were wrapped around the man's body.
In all, the man was carrying 35 adult tarantulas, each about the size of an average hand, and 285 juvenile tarantulas, the wildlife service said.
All of the critters found were native to the Amazon region of Peru, said Walter Silva, a wildlife specialist for the government. The tarantulas are on the country's list of endangered species, he added.
"All were extracted illegally and are part of the illegal wildlife trafficking that moves millions of dollars in the world," Silva said in a news release from the forest and wildlife service.
Peruvian authorities arrested the man, a 28-year-old citizen of South Korea who was traveling back to his country last Friday, with a planned stopover in France, they said. The National Forest and Wildlife Service said it had opened an investigation but did not specify any charges and did not release the name of the man they had detained.
A sting from a bullet ant can feel like the person bitten is being shot, and it can cause temporary paralysis, according to scientists. Centipedes have been used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese medicine. And tarantulas are famously known as hairy and scary spiders.
Silva said cases of illegal wildlife trafficking tend to rise in the weeks before Christmas, because the smuggled animals can fetch higher prices around this time, when they are bought as exotic pets or for collectors.
According to a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Arachnid Science, collectors are driving the trade in scorpions and spiders, at least in the United States.
"An annual breakdown of U.S. imports shows that at least 43% of specimens are not traded as pets but for other purposes, including research, souvenirs, and traditional medicine, with the souvenir sector experiencing an unprecedented growth," the researchers wrote last year.
Endangered tarantulas are considered even bigger prizes for collectors. While most of the recovered tarantulas were not adults, females of breeding age can be more valuable. The young ones are likely to rise in value, since tarantulas can live for up to 30 years.
The exotic pet trade is a multibillion-dollar industry, and the global trade in wildlife is worth between $30 billion and $43 billion annually, according to a 2022 report by the Animal Legal & Historical Center at Michigan State University's law school. The author of the report said that about $23 billion of that share is legal.
"Often, animals are taken from biodiversity rich countries but capital poor and exported to wealthier nations in Europe and the United States," the report said.